Category Archives: Cumbria

This week I helped swap over an old wood-burning stove for a new one. As has been my experience of all practical jobs, what had promised to be a fairly straightforward out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new process ended up having unexpected wrinkles. The chimney pot also needed replacing (since the old fire didn’t draw very well), and a new chimney liner had to be put in. And there was an old liner which had to be pulled out – both liners follow a chimney which is about ten or eleven metres high, so these were interesting tasks in themselves.

The new fire installed

Then an old hearth had to be taken out (which has already happened in the picture above, thanks to the very large drill on the floor, plus a sledgehammer and other hefty tools). Then the new stove had to be moved into position and the exit pipe fastened to the chimney liner with suitable gunk.

Then the paintwork had to be touched up where it had been bashed about by all this. And finally the copious amounts of dust – from stone, soot, brick and ash – had to be cleaned up on pretty much every surface in the room!

The story has a happy ending – the new fire really does light, as you’ll see below, and early impressions are that it is doing a better job than the old one. But while doing this job, I had plenty of time to contemplate fire. Or more widely, energy.

There are some places on planet Earth where people can live without using any energy source for heating, though most places need something at least in wintertime. But every society that I know of, world-wide, has harnessed fire for cooking. This isn’t just for aesthetic or culinary satisfaction – the process of cooking food makes a much wider range of nutrients accessible to our digestive system in much more reliable quantities. So the harnessing of fire for cooking – something like a couple of million years ago, give or take – liberated our hominid ancestors to get on with other things rather than have to forage endlessly. They could prepare food so as to use it more efficiently, and store it so as to survive lean times.

The Venus of Willendorf, c. 30000 years BCE (Wiki)

They could invent fish hooks and jewellery in their spare time, create artwork and conduct sacred ceremonies. (They also designed weapons of increasing effectiveness, and social orders which exaggerated differences in wealth between individuals, but we’ll skip over that for today). The use of fire for cooking seems to coincide with one of those great leaps forward in the often-slow process of human development, signalling this opportunity for our remote ancestors to explore and comprehend their world with intelligence.

Cover – In a Milk and Honeyed Land

All this happened in remote prehistory – long before the Late Bronze Age of In a Milk and Honeyed Land and its sequels, and long before the Langdale world where Quarry will be mainly set. By those times, fire and cooking were established parts of life whose origins were lost in the unfathomable world of the ancestors. But fire – energy – has remained a key part of our expanding world. Our ability to inhabit every part of the world has relied totally on our ability to maintain adequate warmth in our houses. An unprotected human in the middle of an Antarctic winter wind would die within thirty minutes at most, and would be crippled long before that.

A wood-burning stove is basically a very old bit of technology – except the one I helped with was made of metal, which pushes the date much more recent. But the problem it is helping to solve is perennial. Nowadays we don’t actually need to burn wood to generate heat, though many people find the experience of being warmed by an actual fire to be more comforting and engaging than just switching on a radiator. Energy from many sources is fed into our electricity grid – coal, water, wind, oil, nuclear, solar – and whatever the source, it runs an electric fire very nicely. The choice of our national energy spectrum of sources is – and should be – made according to national and global considerations, not whether I personally happen to have one device or another.

Artist’s impression, Juno probe near Jupiter (NASA/JPL)

And the situation become more stark as we go out into space. Space, as well as being mind-bogglingly big – is a weird place. In one sense it is freezing cold – a warm body will radiate away energy at a steady rate. But in another sense it is full of energy – light from the sun, electromagnetic radiation, and down at a quantum level a whole sea of vibrant energy just waiting to be collected. Whether we send out a robotic probe like Dawn, or we go elsewhere in person, we either take our energy with us or we collect it from the void around. The Juno probe has huge solar power collectors – each of those three panels in the picture is about the height of a typical house – and it is operating almost at the outer limit of where such solar panels can be used. Probes that go further from the sun must carry their energy with them, and when it runs out they will die.

Cover, Tau Zero by Poul Anderson (Goodreads)

Most science fiction writers assume that the spaceships that they write about can refuel somewhere in space – maybe by gathering up interstellar hydrogen as they travel about using one variation or another of an idea of the physicist Robert Bussard – Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero was a relatively early novel making use of a Bussard ramjet, and at some stage Star Trek script writers decided that this was how the Enterprise and other similar ships gathered fuel (alongside matter-antimatter reactions and dilithium crystals). That way your ship can carry on boldly going without the inconvenience of having to stop at a nearby starbase just to load fuel into the necessary bunkers.

However it’s done, people will continue to need energy – fire – wherever they go. I think it’s most unlikely that energy sources in my science fiction books look anything like a wood-burning stove, but whatever they do look like, they serve the same purpose.

Last weekend, a whole bunch of people, including a number of my online friends, have been remembering and reenacting the events surrounding the Battle of Hastings – 1066 and All That. It so happens that everyone I know who was at Hastings the other day favoured the Saxon side, from which perspective Harold is a fallen hero, who came so close to repelling the invaders in the south as well as the north. But I suppose that a great many of the participants took the Norman side, and so found themselves once again victorious.

In fact, most people I know prefer the Saxons, and harbour a deep-seated wish that things had gone differently. Perhaps this comes from a desire to cheer on the underdog, or from hearing about how viciously the Normans set about securing the land they had claimed (especially in the north). But I suspect it is also because we were brought up on tales of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men, striving as disenfranchised and downtrodden Saxons against their wicked and uncouth Norman overlords.

Hastings reenactment 2016 (Getty images via BBC)

I have to admit that, personally, I struggle to see the Saxons as unequivocally the nice guys in our history. My own historical preference is earlier, often swimming in the uncertainty and veiled mystery of times before the written word gave us its particular perspective. And from my view, the Saxons (and Angles, etc) are new arrivals who themselves had claimed a new land by often violent methods. The tales of Arthur and his Companions, stripped of their courtly Medieval topcoat, tell us of a time when British and Welsh leaders tried to protect their homes from wave after wave of incoming aggressors.

Statue King Arthur at Tintagel (Trip Advisor)

Ultimately their stand was a failure – from south to north the Saxons defeated and occupied British land, and the points of resistance were only sandcastles in a rising tide. Perhaps the last to fall was Dunmail, in what we now call Cumbria. As this last king of the British lost his last battle, his last few loyal men took his crown and cast it into Grizedale Tarn, so the new usurper would not have the satisfaction of claiming it. Like Arthur, the promise is that Dunmail will – one day – arise again to claim his crown and kingdom.

Grizedale Tarn from Dollywaggon

So – making what I suspect are controversial statements – I kind of feel that there was something karmic in the events of 1066. The Saxons had arrived and pushed aside the earlier occupants, and now something very similar was happening to them.

Now, arrivals into a country are a curious thing. It’s worth thinking about how we reconstruct what happened. In the past we have had to rely on written perspectives, often put down on paper, papyrus, or clay many years later by the winners or their ancestors. Or we look at archaeological remains, which by their nature can only say so much about their owners. Did the same culture adopt new artefacts quite suddenly? Or did a new culture simply reuse the same things as their predecessors? Nowadays we can have a bit more insight from DNA testing, and the outcome of this has sometimes supported and sometimes challenged prior expectation. More of that later.

DNA map of Great Britain (University of Oxford via The Independent)

There are basically two ways that new arrivals interact with those people already there. Sometimes there is violent displacement of the old by the new. This seems to have happened in Bronze Age Britain, where there is hardly any genetic continuity between the Beaker People and their Neolithic precursors – the great stone monument builders have left almost nothing of their genetics throughout most of Britain. This DNA result rather overturned the prior thinking that the change represented a peaceful transfer of ideas.

Other times the old and new quietly absorb each other and are enriched by the process, playing out on a national or regional level the process of human reproduction, with all its delights and difficulties. Newcomers might arrive for all kinds of reasons, martial or peaceful, but after a few years one finds a fusion of the two emerging – a child of both originals.

A beaker of the Beaker People (Natural HIstory Museum)

Now, at the time of arrival, nobody knows what will happen, and it’s natural for the current inhabitants to fear and deride the incoming hoard. So the Saxons did to the Normans.. so the Britons did to the Saxons… so the Neoliths did to the Beaker People… and no doubt so the Neanderthals did to the Homo Sapiens clans. We still see this played out today, as nationalist politics finds innovative ways to arouse anxiety about “the other”. They’ll take our jobs… they’ll impose their religion… they’re not like us… slogans about “the other” can be found in pretty much every part of our world, fuelled by migrations and flights from war and famine. Personally I remain optimistic, and look for the creative fusion of cultures rather than the catastrophic collision. But looking back at history, it takes effort to find creativity, and we humans don’t always manage it.

Going back to DNA, there are still limitations. We can now – tentatively, and extrapolating from individual cases – identify where intercourse has combined the heredity of two cultures. So we know that the DNA map of Britain correlates pretty well with some historical events, and not with others. We know that pretty much all humans outside Africa have a significant percentage of Neanderthal DNA. We know that a teenage girl’s finger from Siberia shows her to be the child of one Neanderthal parent and one Denisovan parent, some 90,000 years ago. But what we don’t know is the circumstances of the intercourse. Was it a socially sanctioned event, even a personally consenting one? Or was it something darker, the result of forced prostitution or rape? DNA cannot tell us, but that’s the kind of detail we would like in order to uncover the interactions of peoples. It’s one of the great anxieties of mankind – do the newcomers arrive in peace or war?

Siberian cave where the girl’s finger was found (Bence Viola/Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)

I thought I’d blog about weather today, firstly because it often matters when writing about the past, and secondly as a kind of shameless advert for my most recent Alexa skill. Let’s get that out of the way first – it’s called Cumbrian Weather, and it requests a short-range forecast from the Mountain Weather Information Service. Why not just use the built-in weather service on Alexa? Well, MWIS focus on weather insofar as it impacts outdoor pursuits such as walking, cycling, rock-climbing and so on. So the forecast includes essential things like whether the peaks are covered in cloud, what the temperature is at 750m, what height you reach freezing point as you climb up, and the like. All of which interest me, so I have accessed this data-feed and present it through Alexa. Like all my Alexa skills to date, it is entirely free to enable and use.

Rough weather on Bryher, Isles of Scilly

Which brings me nicely to the impact of weather on historical fiction. You get macro-level events that shape the whole story, such as drought, floods, a long winter, and so on. These are often used to set the scene, or the tone, for a book. Storms at sea are a staple of maritime fiction, and are a handy device for placing characters in unforeseen circumstances.

But in daily life as well as fiction, it’s also the smaller scale events that can derail the best intentions. And the nature of these events varies hugely with location. In London, where I am writing this, then the impact is often seen on transport – the famous autumnal “leaves on the track” problem which no doubt will be affecting commuters before long. A century or so ago, pollution and fog could easily combine to produce an unpleasant, unhealthy, and all-but-impenetrable smog.

Up in Cumbria, a night’s rain in the wrong place can end with localised floods. Storm Desmond, back in the winter of 2015, left major roads unusable, and washed away several bridges, quite apart from the impact on houses and shops. That aside, you can have a run of several days when even low peaks and ridges are invisible because of low cloud, frustrating work and movement between valleys. The various mountain rescue teams are regularly called out to succour people who have been caught by surprise up a height, and are completely unprepared for a weather change.

These more rapid, more local shifts and switches are every bit as important to fictional characters, as their real life equivalents are to us. Naturally, the particular kinds of weather change that matter to people vary from place to place – one location may have low cloud and mist, another one sudden blizzards, and a third sandstorms. It’s as well to find out what your characters might have to contend with!

Next week I’ll be having a quick look at weather on other planets. Not yet an everyday topic for most of us, but potentially it will be in a few years.

I’ve made occasional comments about a prehistoric novel I am planning, set in what we now call Cumbria, and tentatively called Quarry at this stage, Well, I had thought that this was only at a very early planning stage, and that I wouldn’t start actually writing anything until The Liminal Zone was done and dusted – and possibly The Authentication Key (=Far from the Spaceports vol 3) as well. (For any readers waiting for those two books, fear not… they are definitely in progress…)

But as things turned out, Quarry has been nagging at me until I put something down, so here is an extract. It is probably from very near the start, if not the actual opening. Bonus points to anyone who can not only identify the high ground mentioned, but also the tarn… (tree cover in the period in question was much more extensive than now)

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Quarry image

Bran woke, all at once as the unfamiliar sun kissed his eyes. He had bedded down the previous evening at the edge of a stand of short trees, all bursting into greenleaf. A broad swathe of grass ran down to a round pool.

The clouds had lowered as he reached the mere, and he had read that as a sign to stop. Not that the sign meant much, as cloud and springtime mist had walked beside him from the moment, two days ago, when he had started to climb up from the broad valley into the hills. The stones of a gathering circle, straddling the place where five ways crossed, had swum out of fog as he neared them, and he had turned half-left and stumbled along the ancient ridge track, anxiously placing his feet where so many others had walked, until the next cairn appeared. And the next, and the next, until he was weary of half-seen forms, and chilled by the wind and the droplets of water that clung to wool and leather, hair and skin.

The mist had stayed with him through all of that day and the next, veiling the peaks and ridges on either side. When he finally stood in the travellers’ place at Pen-y-lugh, the long lake it stood on was shrouded, the east and west shores soon fading to shapeless bands of darker grey. The townspeople, seeing the set of tools at his belt, and the tattoo of the stone-workers clan, had directed him up a gentle track. He had left the settlement again, and worked an easy way around the side of a crumpled hill.

Now there was morning sun, and a still air that left not a ripple on the circle of water in front of him. His shadow fell across it as he stood, and the trees opposite – oak and birch, hazel and holly – stood upright on the heels of their own reflections. He looked down at their length stretched out in the water, and saw below all of them an arc of grey rock, speckled with white.

He looked up again, eyes tracing the trunks and the leaves, until he was looking at the real spur instead of the reflected one. It was his first sight of the place where he would work. From here, it was a two-headed beast. A long curved ridgeback ended in those proud upraised horns. Perhaps it had once settled from the skies onto the valley wall, its fiery ardour slowly solidifying into crag and rock. Or perhaps it had welled up from the world below, forming these shapes as it contended with the outward air. Now it was cold and hard, and the snow of winter still streaked its spine and flanks.

He leaned back against the rowan tree which had sheltered him last night, and gazed, filling himself with that first sight. Somewhere below those outcrops, he supposed, his dwelling-place was waiting, though it was hidden from him by all the forest between. But his task, day after day, would be to clamber up between the beast’s paws, to find and follow its congealed veins as they wound their precious way back into the stone body. There he would tease out the best of the unformed teardrops of rock, and shape them into gifts. Gifts for war or gifts for love: each one would be a thing of beauty drawn out from the mountain.

A squirrel chattered nearby, and a family of wagtails began to dabble along the water’s edge. It was time to go; it was time to finish his journey to the quarry.

As well as Boot and the Hardknott Pass, which I’ve been talking about the last couple of weeks, I spent a fair amount of time around Ullswater while in Cumbria. It’s the second longest of the lakes (after Windermere) and has often been claimed to be the most aesthetically pleasing. For example, Wainwright called it, “that loveliest of lakes, curving gracefully into the far distance“. Be that as it may, it certainly has a wealth of natural beauty and historical interest. But the fact that at many points around its shores, the hills encroach very steeply, means that it is only thinly settled, and parts of it are quite difficult to approach except on foot or by using one of the several launches that go to and fro.

Helvellyn against the skyline

The particular part I want to focus on runs down the eastern side of the lake. It is another part of the Cumbrian network of ancient trackways – later adopted by the Romans for their own purposes. This one is now called High Street, running by the hill of that name a little further south, and ultimately connects to Ambleside… and hence Hardknott, Boot, and the coast.

The Cockpit, looking roughly south

My starting point, after some gentle approach climbing up from the lake, was at an ancient stone circle called The Cockpit. Nobody knows the original name, or indeed the original purpose. It probably dates from the Bronze Age, could be up to about 5000 years old and is one component of a large collection of ancient sites on Moor Divock. Whenever and whyever it was built, it lay then as now on a crossroads. A roughly north-south route from Penrith to Ambleside crosses a roughly east-west route coming across from Castlerigg (near Keswick) to the Eden Valley and Shap. The much later Romans would be making similar journeys, though they were more interested in their settlement near Cockermouth than in looking at the Castlerigg stone circle. And nowadays casual explorers like me go there.

Milepost marker

So from The Cockpit you head south – like Burnmoor near Boot, the current terrain is wild and slightly boggy, but back in the days of prehistoric occupation it was rather more pleasant. There’s a long steady climb up towards Loadpot Hill, but well before you get there you can see many of lakeland’s most dramatic peaks in the distance – Blencathra, Skiddaw, the whole length of the Helvellyn ridge, and then Fairfield and others heading south. You also regularly see other signs of human occupation, from other prehistoric arrangements of stones through Roman mileposts, to a very few much more recent (and ruined) dwellings. The track itself stretches out in front of you, and there’s a real sense of walking in the footsteps of a whole throng of ancestors. You really could walk on through the Kirkstone Pass and down to the shores of Windermere, provided you were equipped for the journey.

(Former) Roman altar, old St Martin’s church

I didn’t do that, but turned off the ridge into Martindale, where one last historical treat awaits. The current old church of St Martin’s dates from Elizabethan times, but a church has been there since the Middle Ages. The font – which has been used there for some 500 years – was originally a Roman altar, retrieved by some enterprising villagers from somewhere along High Street. In the graveyard is an ancient yew, which some believe is among the oldest living trees in England and could be up to 1300 years old. That would probably predate the first appearance of Christianity here, and would mean that, like the Roman altar, it had once been involved in very different expressions of spirituality.

All in all a great walk, and one to revisit at some stage. And, of course, all good raw material to stir into the (pre)historical novel Quarry which is slowly coming together in my mind.

Last week I talked about my trip across to Boot and thence up onto Burnmoor to enjoy the prehistoric monuments there. Readers will remember that I had got there over the Hardknott Pass. But the pass itself enjoys another ancient ruin – the much more recent Roman fort of Mediobogdum. It is surprisingly well preserved – presumably because it is far enough away from any of the nearby farms that the stones were not robbed too extensively for building projects.

Galava (?) Roman Fort, Ambleside

It’s one of those forts which makes you curious about the Roman predilection for building forts at regular intervals. At least, I presume that this is the reason for building just here. The next fort along is down at Ambleside, at the top end of Windermere – we suspect that this is either Galava or Clanoventa as mentioned by Antonine, and the local publicity strongly favours the first of these. That fort – which is also worth a visit – has been nicely reconstructed so you can easily imagine the life of the garrison, with easy access along northern, north-eastern, and southern land routes, and a decent-sized port to access the lake. But from Ambleside you can also head more-or-less due west, towards the distant sea. To get there you have to cross ridges containing some of the highest Lakeland peaks, and the Romans – like modern road-builders – chose to go over the Wrynose and Hardknott passes.

(As an aside, just to finish the chain of forts and roads, you can head roughly north-west from Ambleside to get over the High Street route (which was an ancient track long before the Romans borrowed it) up to near Penrith and thence on to Hadrian’s Wall. I’ll be saying more about High Street in another post soon. From Penrith you could also go along what is now the A66 west towards Troutbeck, or east towards Appleby-in-Westmorland. Or southwards towards Kendal, Kirkby Lonsdale and Lancaster.)

Hardknott Fort, looking towards the Irish Sea and Isle of Man

But then we get to the business of regular intervals, The Romans could have marched on a few miles further down into the valley before building their next fort – say down to the village of Boot, which is comparatively sheltered and protected. But no – the fort was built high up in the pass. In summer it is a spectacular place, with views all the way down Eskdale to the Irish Sea and over to the Isle of Man. The road ended at the sea, at Itunocelum. Now, on a fine day, it would be a great place to be posted. But even in summer, you get a lot of days with low cloud pressing a long way down the pass, or wet trade winds bringing drizzle or worse up from the sea. My guess is that even in summer, you get the great views at most one day in three.

Hardknott Fort

And then there’s the winter days, when a soldier in the garrison would expect lots of gloom, cold and darkness! If you had come up here from southern Italy, you might well be wondering where on Earth you had come to! It’s not even as though there were large numbers of hostile natives to keep at bay – it would have made more sense to site the fort somewhere else.

But here is Mediobogdum. On a clear day it is genuinely spectacular, and also gives a peculiar insight into Roman military thinking.

A few days ago I finally achieved a long-standing goal of walking north from Boot (in Eskdale, Cumbria) up towards Wastwater. Boot is quite remote, to say the least. The shortest route from Grasmere, by a considerable margin, is over the Wrynose and Hardknott passes, but these are difficult in a lot of weather conditions, so some folk take the longer route around southern Cumbria via Ulverston and Broughton-in-Furness. Happily the weather smiled on my journey, so the passes needed only ordinary care – and I’ll be writing a bit more about Hardknott on another occasion. Wastwater has a reputation of being the most remote lake in all of Lakeland, but since it has a fairly direct route up onto Scafell or Scafell Pike (depending which track you choose at the start, down in the valley) it still attracts a decent number of people.

Looking toward the Irish Sea from Burnmoor

The attraction for me was the chance to see some of the prehistoric sites just north of Boot. Today the region is a rather damp and unprepossessing tract of moorland, but back in the Neolithic and Bronze ages, it supported a reasonable population who (presumably) found it a pleasant spot to live. Times change. Back then, the sea level in the north-west of England was probably somewhere between 10 and 30m above where it is now. The change is principally because the land has risen rather than the sea level falling. As the weight of ice fell away from the land after the close of the last ice age, say about ten thousand years ago in round numbers, the land bounced back (the technical term being “isostatic rebound“). If you take a map of present-day Cumbria and shade in another 20 metres worth of sea, you find that places like Boot were not so far away from the coast.

Not only that, but the vegetation was quite different. Much larger tracts of land were wooded. It is not yet clear whether the trees formed continuous forest, or were scattered in coppices, clustered around the various tarns and streams. Whichever of these is the case, the landscape back then would look very different from what we see today. This change is partly climatic and partly to do with land clearance – the (fairly recent) adoption of sheep farming in the hills has had the side-effect of considerably reducing the tree cover. Some places have kept a decent amount of woodland, but others have almost completely lost it.

Rocky outcrop above Boot (“the altar”)

As you climb up from Boot, passing some comparatively recent peat-cutters’ houses, you come up onto the moorland plateau. To your left is a belt of lowland, leading to the Irish Sea. Ahead, if you have picked the correct track up onto Burnmoor, is a large rocky outcrop. It overlooks not just one or two stone circles, but no less than five! The first – Brat’s Hill – is the largest, comprising 42 stones in a 30 metre ring, and containing 5 burial cairns in the interior. Following this are two pairs of two smaller circles – White Moss are closer, and Low Longrigg further away.

Brat’s Hill circle, with Great Gable in the distance, and the slope of Scafell to the right

Why five circles so close? Did they serve different purposes? Did some fall into disuse and needed to be replaced? Did they belong to different clans or religious groups? Or take turns of importance according to some rota? Were the smaller ones practice rings for children or novices? We just don’t know. Most people assume that the outcrop was used as an integral part of the whole – perhaps to summon people to the place, or address them once there. Was it used for group exhortation, religious ritual, treaty negotiation, or social debate? Whatever the original use, it is often now just called “the altar”. Today, as well as the sea off to one side, the great peaks of Scafell and Great Gable overlook the plateau. It is a magnificent place. Perhaps the stone circles were originally in woodland glades – in which case some of the distant views would not be visible. But my personal suspicion is that the trees stopped well short of this area, and that the long views of mountain and sea were an important part of the experience.

Maiden Castle

Further on – once you have torn yourself away from the rings and skirted the fringe of Boat How – you get to Burnmoor Tarn, nestling in a hollow of the surrounding ridges and overlooked by Scafell. On the northern side the path goes over a saddle and down into Wastwater. And up in the saddle there is a more substantial ring of stones, called Maiden Castle (as so many of these places are). The stones are about 7m across, and are positioned on a slightly larger dry area, raised a little above the damp moorland. It is almost certainly a burial cairn, and you have to wonder who wanted to be buried here, overlooked not just by Scafell and the Gable, but also several other more northerly peaks which have by now become visible.

From here, I turned back to Boot, but you could go on exploring this plateau for a considerable time. But whether you stay a long or short time, the area leaves more questions than answers in your mind. What were these circles used for? Politics, religion, or just fun? One day, I intend exploring these questions in fiction, with an as-yet-untitled story centred on the stone axe “factory” in Langdale… I now have a working title – Quarry – but not much storyline yet…

It has been a busy time for Alexa generally – Amazon have extended sales of various of the hardware gizmos to many other countries. That’s well and good for everyone: the bonus for us developers is that they have also extended the range of countries into which custom skills can be deployed. Sometimes with these expansions Amazon helpfully does a direct port to the new locale, and other times it’s up to the developer to do this by hand. So when skills appeared in India, everything I had done to that date was copied across automatically, without me having to do my own duplication of code. From Monday Jan 8th the process of generating default versions for Australia and New Zealand will begin. And Canada is also now in view. Of course, that still leaves plenty of future catch-up work, firstly making sure that their transfer process worked OK, and secondly filling in the gaps for combinations of locale and skill which didn’t get done. The full list of languages and countries to which skills can be deployed is now

English (UK)

English (US)

English (Canada)

English (Australia / New Zealand)

English (India)

German

Japanese

The world, Robinson projection (Wiki)

Based on progress so far, Amazon will simply continue extending this to other combinations over time. I suspect that French Canadian will be quite high on their list, and probably other European languages – for example Spanish would give a very good international reach into Latin America. Hindi would be a good choice, and Chinese too, presupposing that Amazon start to market Alexa devices there. Currently an existing Echo or Dot will work in China if hooked up to a network, but so far as I know the gadgets are not on sale there – instead several Chinese firms have begun producing their own equivalents. Of course, there’s nothing to stop someone in another country accessing the skill in one or other of the above languages – for example a Dutch person might consider using either the English (UK) or German option.

To date I have not attempted porting any skills in German or Japanese, essentially through lack of necessary language skills. But all of the various English variants are comparatively easy to adapt to, with an interesting twist that I’ll get to later.

Wordsworth Facts Web Icon

So my latest skill out of the stable, so to speak, is Wordsworth Facts. It has two parts – a small list of facts about the life of William Wordsworth, his family, and some of his colleagues, and also some narrated portions from his poems. Both sections will increase over time as I add to them. It was interesting, and a measure of how text-to-speech technology is improving all the time, to see how few tweaks were necessary to get Alexa to read these extract tolerably well. Reading poetry is harder than reading prose, and I was expecting difficulties. The choice of Wordsworth helped here, as his poetry is very like prose (indeed, he was criticised for this at the time). As things turned out, in this case some additional punctuation was needed to get these sounding reasonably good, but that was all. Unlike some of the previous reading portions I have done, there was no need to tinker with phonetic alphabets to get words sounding right. It certainly helps not to have ancient Egyptian, Canaanite, or futuristic names in the mix!

And this brings me to one of the twists in the internationalisation of skills. The same letter can sound rather different in different versions of English when used in a word – you say tomehto and I say tomarto, and all that. And I necessarily have to dive into custom pronunciations of proper names of characters and such like – Damariel gets a bit messed up, and even Mitnash, which I had assumed would be easily interpreted, gets mangled. So part of the checking process will be to make sure that where I have used a custom phonetic version of someone’s name, it comes out right.

Wordsworth Facts is live across all of the English variants listed above – just search in your local Amazon store in the Alexa Skills section by name (or to see all my skills to date, search for “DataScenes Development“, which is the identity I use for coding purposes. If you’re looking at the UK Alexa Skills store, this is the link.

The next skill I am planning to go live with, probably in the next couple of weeks, is Polly Reads. Those who read this blog regularly – or indeed the Before The Second Sleep blog (see this link, or this, or this) – may well think of Polly as Alexa’s big sister. Polly can use multiple different voices and languages rather than a fixed one, though Polly is focused on generating spoken speech rather than interpreting what a user might be saying (the module in Amazon’s suite that does the comprehension bit is called Lex). So Polly Reads is a compendium of all the various book readings I have set up using Polly, onto which I’ll add a few of my own author readings where I haven’t yet set Polly up with the necessary text and voice combinations. The skill is kind of like a playlist, or maybe a podcast, and naturally my plan is to extend the set of readings over time. More news of that will be posted before the end of the month, all being well.

Kayak logo (from https://www.kayakonline.info/)

The process exposed a couple of areas where I would really like Amazon to enhance the audio capabilities of Alexa. The first was when using the built-in ability to access music (ie not my own custom skill). Compared to a lot of Alexa interaction, this feels very clunky – there is no easy way to narrow in on a particular band, for example – “The band is Dutch and they play prog rock but I can’t remember the name” could credibly come up with Kayak, but doesn’t. There’s no search facility built in to the music service. And you have to get the track name pretty much dead on – “Alexa, Play The Last Farewell by Billy Boyd” gets you nowhere except for a “I can’t find that” message, since it is called “The Last Goodbye“. A bit more contextual searching would be good. Basically, this boils down to a shortfall in what technically we call context, and what in a person would be short-term memory – the coder of a skill has to decide exactly what snippets of information to remember from the interaction so far – anything which is not explicitly remembered, will be discarded.

That was a user-moan. The second is more of a developer-moan. Playing audio tracks of more than a few seconds – like a book extract, or a decent length piece of music – involves transferring control from your own skill to Alexa, who then manages the sequencing of tracks and all that. That’s all very well, and I understand the purpose behind it, but it also means that you have lost some control over the presentation of the skill as the various tracks play. For example, on the new Echo Show (the one with the screen) you cannot interleave the tracks with relevant pictures – like a book cover, for example. Basically the two bits of capability don’t work very well together. Of course all these things are very new, but it would be great to see some better integration between the different pieces of the jigsaw. Hopefully this will be improved with time…

I have been in Cumbria the last few days – England’s Lake District – and have been surrounded by history. Of course there are the hills, first established up to about 500 million years ago and steadily being reshaped by nature’s forces since then. Then there are the various lakes and tarns, mostly the result of glaciation on a timescale of about 11,000 to 100,000 years ago. And of course the various signs of humanity’s use of the landscape, going back a few thousand years.

Commanding Officer’s house, Ambleside Roman fort

But also there are specific signs of human activity, and I have been happily looking at some of these. Just outside Ambleside, at the northern end of Windermere, are some rather well displayed remnants of a Roman fort. It’s name is not known with certainty, but the most likely claim is Galava, identified in later Roman records in this vicinity. The earliest fort held a unit of about 200 soldiers, and was upgraded over time to have about 500. As well as barracks and all the usual paraphernalia of a Roman fort, it also boasted a jetty onto the lakeside at which, one presumes, cargo and passengers arrived and departed. From here, roads led off west towards the splendid fort in the Hardknott Pass (which I haven’t yet visited) and also up the eastern side of Ullswater towards Penrith, Carlisle, and Hadrian’s Wall.

The Langdale Pikes from a distance

But as well as that there are considerably older signs of human habitation, and I have to admit that these excite me rather more than the Roman ones. Back in Neolithic times, there was a stone axe “factory” up amongst the Langdale Pikes. These tower impressively over the Langdale Valley, and are easily identified from many miles away as you approach. If you come as tourist, your first view of them might well be from Windermere railway station, but actually they can be spotted from a few places rather further afield. Axes from Langdale have been found all across Britain and beyond, and were clearly highly prized items in their day.

Rock art at Chapel Stile Boulders

And as you approach the pikes along the Langdale Valley, on the valley floor just outside a village called Chapel Stile, there is a collection of boulders which are adorned with Neolithic rock art. Like virtually all of such art in Britain, it seems abstract to us, and does not admit of any easy interpretation. It is impossible – when you are there – to think that the people who cut the marks on those rocks were not making a connection with the stone axe site, but the nature of the connection is now unknown. Perhaps they were directions, or messages of welcome, or warnings of how to treat the local deities – but we just don’t know.

It’s an enigma, and a pleasant one to contemplate as you make your own way along the valley… and one day I hope to spin all this lot into a story…

Today’s blog about the link between King Arthur and Cumbria looks at his death, and the mysterious circumstances of the Lady of the Lake. But first, a link between a figure who was definitely real, and the Arthurian tales – the Matter of England, as it has been called.

Grisedale Tarn from Dolly Wagon

For this, you have to walk a little way up from the southernmost tip of Ullswater, from the villages of Glenridding or Patterdale. Follow what is now the Coast to Coast walk up the long valley until you get to Grisedale Tarn, in the saddle point between the summits of Fairfield and Dolly Wagon. From here, if you wanted, you could drop down again into Grasmere. And here, according to rumour, Dunmail, the last British king of the region and possibly the whole country, ordered his crown to be flung into the tarn rather than fall into the hands of his victorious enemies (see an earlier post I wrote all about this). When the time is right, just like Arthur, he and his men will reclaim the crown and return to England’s help./ Now, Dunmail (probably) died around 975 AD, a few hundred years after the (probable) time of Arthur, but this shows that the connection was firmly in people’s minds.

Lady of the Lake on Ullswater

Returning back down the Grisedale valley to Ullswater I found, to my surprise, there is a belief that this was the Lake from which Arthur’s sword came. Now, once again this part of the overall story had always been linked in my mind to the south. But not by everyone, apparently. One of the Ullswater passenger steamers is, in fact, called The Lady of the Lake to commemorate this. But how old is the tradition?

Looking down Grisedale towards Patterdale

Like so many other things about these events, written evidence is comparatively late and almost certainly cannot be relied upon. We have to just look at possibilities.

King Arthur (2004) DVD cover (Amazon)

Indeed, The historian Michael Wood went on record to the effect that the original stories “surprisingly, do not take us to the South West or to Wales, but to Cumbria, southern Scotland, and the ancient kingdom of Rheged, around the Solway”. Arthur’s final battle – at Camlann or Camboglanna – has been variously placed in Cornwall, near Cader Idris in Wales, or near Carlisle – if we follow the norther trail, then the Roman fort of Birdoswald is a very good candidate. Those who watched the 2004 version of King Arthur may remember the whole northern setting. Several other events from Arthur’s life can be credibly located along the Roman Wall, and if he really was mortally wounded here, then a retreat down to Ullswater is feasible. Carlisle to Pooley Bridge, the nearest point of Ullswater, is only about 20 miles.

I must admit that back in the days when I was committed to the southern theory, I could never reconcile the two mental images this last episode conjures up. One is of a moorland battle, with Arthur gazing round at bodies strewn among heather and gorse. The other is of the lakeshore where the sword was finally given back. Down south there are comparatively few places where these images could be reconciled. But a battle near the old wall, followed by a retreat to Ullswater, makes much more sense.

Water, mist and hills…

The setting is undoubtedly atmospheric, especially of a morning when mists hover over the waters, with the mountain peaks rising darkly above. When you’re there, it’s actually quite easy to imagine the Lady’s arm emerging from the waters, or Sir Bedivere standing on the shoreline, sword in hand, torn between obedience and desire. I could go along with that.

The Death of Arthur by James Archer (Wiki)

What of his resting place? Again there is plenty of variety in the tradition to choose from. You have the romantic vision of him that artists often pick, in which he is carried away in a barge, tended to by queens. But there are other options. And according to one of these, Arthur, and possibly a selection of his followers, ended up in caves below Blencathra, also called Saddleback.

Looking across Derwent Water towards Blencathra under looming skies

Blencathra is north east of Keswick, and only about 8 or 9 miles from the closest part of Ullswater. And it’s a comparatively easy 8 or 9 miles, across open land not particularly broken up by hills and valleys. It’s also an exceptionally bleak area to cross in the wrong sort of weather conditions. Now I have to admit I have never climbed Blencathra in all my many visits to the region – it’s a bit shapeless at its summit, overlooked by the rather more interesting Skiddaw. And part of it – Sharp Edge – is one of the most hazardous locations of the region, resulting in more deaths, injuries and mountain rescue call-outs than anywhere else. For a different and much more upbeat view, real mountaineers such as Doug Scott and Chris Bonnington have said it is one of their favourite climbs. Either way, some say that this is where Arthur rests.

There are lots of competing stories and interpretations, but for me the whole process has been one of realisation that the north-west has a very good claim to Arthur.